Identifying Phishing Emails

A Phishing email is an email that’s designed to trick you into handing over information such as bank or login details so they can either send out spam to other people (using your email), identity theft or stealing money from you.
They’re designed to look as close as they can to an official email, so here’s a few tricks on how to work out if they’re actually legitimate emails or not.
This guide is written assuming you’re using Mail.app on a Mac, but it the process is very similar in any other email program.

Check the Sender

In Mail on a Mac, you can click on the sender to see where the email is coming from. You should check to see if the address here looks legitimate.
Note that some spam will look like it’s coming from a legitimate address, even if it’s not real!
Here’s an example, it’s an email that looks like it’s coming from the Good Guys, if you click on who it’s from, it’s actually coming from a strange address (in this case, enycertiets.info).

Check the Links

You can hover your mouse over a link to see where it leads. Check to make sure the address is correct.
In our Good Guys spam example, you would *expect* the link on the website to be a goodguys address, in this case however, it’s pointing to enycertiets.info. That’s pretty sus!

Here’s another example, you can see it has a link there, but when you hover your mouse over the link, it’s actually pointing to a completely different address!